KWDI Korean Women’s Development Institute

Flexible Working Arrangements(FWAs) have garnered much attention as part of the broad measures to bring changes to the ‘amounts of working hours’, to ‘the place of working’, and to ‘the scheduling of working’ in the labor market. FWAs can be analyzed from the two different perspectives: one from the employer’s perspective and the other from the employee’s perspective. In this research, we have chosen the latter side. So we approached the FWAs’ working and its effects on the working parents who are caring children under 13 years old. Based on the experiences of working parents who are using the FWAs, we’ve analyzed what kinds of changes the flexible working arrangements bring to family life and ultimately to a balance between work and family responsibilities. Teleworking and Remote working are the types of flexible working arrangements that are to be studied in this research, both of which are utilizing information communication technology to allow employees to work at home or at remote locations, bringing changes to workplace, working methods and to working hours. In that sense, Teleworking and Remote working arrangements are considered the most appropriate subject matters in analyzing the effects of flexible working arrangements on family life. The results of this study are summarized as follows: The survey on 307 working parents who have benefited from Teleworking or Remote working and an in-depth interview on 15 of them show that most working parents are satisfied with the flexible working arrangements. Specifically, surveyed working parents responded that they were able to enhance work efficiency, reconcile work and family responsibilities and improve their family relationships thanks to the flexible working arrangements. But the answers on the use of flexible working arrangements show the differences by gender: Female employees were more satisfied with the flexible working arrangements and spent more time in fulfilling family responsibilities, especially childcare. Overall, those who used the flexible working arrangements seem to experience less conflict between work and family responsibilities and enjoy their life, work and family life more compared with those who have not used the flexible working arrangements. However, in case of female respondents, the experiences of using the flexible working arrangements show double-edged results. They chose to benefit from the flexible working arrangements as part of a ‘strategic choice’ to balance work and family life but, at the same time, they had to bear the risk of ‘falling to the less decent jobs’. Such reality is what requires urgent policy attention in the process of implementing the flexible working arrangements for the coming years. The Path Analysis shows that the flexible working arrangements have significant effects on working hours, parenting time, division of roles between husband and wife, and working parents are enjoying some extra time and mental recovery time. Particularly, there is need to enact a policy focused on family relationship variable(parenting time and sharing of responsibilities between husband and wife). Based on the above research results, this research suggests specific recommendations for the three major policy areas: strengthening systematic and policy foundations of the flexible working arrangements, bringing changes to the corporate culture, and supporting working parents in balancing work and family responsibilities.